For each and every one of my 22 days on the road during LA/XC –my cross-country-road-trip-with-beagle — and ever since, I’ve been haunted by the thought: Why no Jeep?
You may think “haunted” is too strong a word, but you wouldn’t if you understood my true core weirdness and the depth of my affinity for my Wrangler. I’m not a “car guy” — don’t understand how a car works, and don’t care — but my deep-blue Jeep and I have been together for 11 years, and I’m more attached to it than any other car I’ve owned.
I love its looks. Its beady eyes. Its distinctive goofy-but-endearing grille. Its funky profile — seems like a stiff wind could blow the thing over. You’d never use the words “streamlined” and “Wrangler” in the same sentence, but for my money, a more clunkily gorgeous automobile has never been designed.
I love how everything’s manual — and I don’t just mean the transmission. If you want to adjust the side mirror, you don’t fiddle with a rocker switch; you reach out and you tug on the mirror. If you want to take down the soft top and turn the Jeep into a convertible, you don’t push a button; you rip down the canvas roof and stuff it into the boot. If you need to drain the water that’s pooled under the driver’s seat because you left your Jeep out, uncovered, in a popup thunderstorm, you pull the plug in the floor. Nothing ever doesn’t work — because there’s nothing to work.
I love how outside the whole thing is. When you pull down the the top, stow the plastic front windows, and unzip the rear ones, driving your Jeep is as close to riding a motorcycle as you’re gonna get on 4 wheels.
And I suppose it goes without saying that the Jeep Wrangler is the perfect car for a perpetual teenage wannabe.
In my mind’s eye, it would have been just right for the trip. Ricky loves riding shotgun in the Jeep more than anything, his right ear flapping in the wind, Dumbo-style, over the low-riding door. I could just picture me, Ricky, and the Jeep at the Grand Canyon. Me, Ricky, and the Jeep at Big Sur. Me, Ricky, and the Jeep on the Strip in Las Vegas.
So why no Jeep?
Enter pragmatism. There was Ricky’s crate, and his doggy bed, and his food, supplies, and his meds. There was everything I might need for three-weeks-plus. When I laid it all out on the driveway, there was no way it would fit into the Jeep’s small cargo space. And in cold or stormy weather, did I really want to be cooped up with my dog in a tiny Wrangler? And what if I miscalculated and we found ourselves with no motel room for the night? The two of us could certainly curl up in the back of the Acura SUV, but I couldn’t say the same for the Jeep.
As it happened, of course, I never used seven-eighths of what I packed for the trip, so we probably could have fit it all into the Jeep. And we drove some 21 of the 22 days under brilliant blue skies and balmy temperatures — for which the top-down Wrangler would have been perfect. And we never found ourselves stuck without a place to say — though we came pretty damn close in the Badlands.
As if my own conscience wasn’t enough, last week I was telling Chaz, our exterminator, about the adventure. “You took the Jeep, didn’t you?” he asked — as if to do otherwise would have been insane. The same week, I saw my old friend Malcolm down at Burying Hill Beach, doing his daily polar-bear swim in the sound. My road trip, he said, was something he’d always wanted to do. “Of course, you and Ricky went in the Jeep, right?” he said. As in, duh.
Okay, okay. Next time.
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